FROM BOOKSTORE TO SUPERSTORE
Can you believe that a little more than
two decades ago, Amazon was still one man, a light bulb idea and a home garage?
Circa 1994, Jeff Bezos began working on a
business plan (yes, in his garage) for what would eventually become the largest
internet retailer in the US. In 1995, the company made its official debut.
In those early days, Bezos and his
employees would pack books and bring them to the post office themselves, and
even after the company began to build warehouses and acquire more assets, many
investors still wrote them off as another dot-com pipedream. Of
course, even Bezos couldn’t have mapped out every twist and turn, as our
selection of key turning points in Amazon’s journey from garage to the globe
proves.
Jeff Bezos launched Amazon as an online
bookstore, and strategically chose Seattle, Washington as the home base
location. Due to Washington’s lack of sales tax, it allowed Amazon to sell
nearly all over without having to collect sales tax from its customers. Bezos finally
made the decision to go with “Amazon”, named after the largest river in the
world (his goal was to lead the company to become the largest bookstore in the
world.) He thought of the idea while looking through the dictionary,
specifically targeting names that began with “A” as he believed it would give
the company the advantage of being listed higher in alphabetized lists.
Amazon
moved into a whole new area of business as it began to allow third-party
sellers to move merchandise through the site.
In terms of revenue, Amazon is the biggest
internet-based company in the world. When it started out selling books online
in 1994, Jeff Bezos had an idea that the best way to succeed online was to grow
big and fast. Today, the company sells everything from
books to groceries to shipping container houses. It has become a one-stop-shop
and has many ambitions for its future.
Amazon was not the first company to hit on
this business strategy. Another company, Computer Literacy (a Silicon Valley
bookstore) began selling its own wares online as early as 1991.
The difference that Amazon.com had to
offer was its greater convenience. It, from the off, was based on a model of
delivering online orders directly to the customer's address anywhere in the
world.
As we all know now, Amazon.com is about a
lot more than just books today. This was always the plan, according to Bezos.
During
an earnings call in 2005, Jeff Bezos announced a customer loyalty program that
offered free two-day shipping on any order, along with other perks and benefits
for only $79 per year. Prime has proved to be a massive success: it now has
more than 112 million members across the globe. Amazon
had been developing the Echo (and Alexa capabilities) since 2011, and finally
began selling the devices in June 2015. The idea of an in-home virtual
assistant was novel and exciting for many, but few realized just how big it
would become in such a short time.
No organisation has escaped the worldwide
impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, but few have been such prominent players as
Amazon.
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